Thursday, January 31, 2013

On a Prayer and a Poem – A Storm Coming & Rendezvous
With Death at Dealey Plaza

By William Kelly (bkjfk3@yahoo.com)

On October 5, 1962 President Kennedy's daughter Caroline interrupted a meeting of the National Security Council to read him a poem, while in Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald
cashed a check from the Leslie Welding Company.

These two seemingly disparate events, when examined closely, help show how their intentions, decisions and actions would lead to their crossing paths, intersecting at Houston and Elm Streets in Dallas over a year later, and how those who really accomplished what Oswald is credited for, go unidentified, unheralded and unavenged.

James Douglas, in a speech at the Dallas Coalition On
Political Assassinations (COPA) annual conference in Dallas (in November 2009), discussed the government policy that makes it possible - the concept of plausible deniability, and he echoed
many of the thoughts from his important and increasingly significant book JFK – Why He Died And Why It Matters
(2009). (1)

In his talk Douglas mentioned two small but telling incidents about
President Kennedy that reflect on his personality
and convictions, one a prayer, The Storm Coming, and the other a poem,
Rendezvous With Death. [For complete text of speech or to see and hear on
Youtube see Note (2).]

The Prayer

In his talk James Douglas said:

….Late at night on the June 5, 1961,
plane flight back to Washington from his Vienna meeting with Nikita Khrushchev,
a weary President Kennedy wrote down on a slip of paper, as he was about to
fall asleep, a favorite saying of his from Abraham Lincoln – really a prayer.
Presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln discovered the slip of paper on the
floor. On it she read the words: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm
coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

Kennedy loved that prayer. He cited it
repeatedly. More important, he made the prayer his own. In his conflicts with
Khrushchev, then more profoundly with the CIA
and the military, he had seen a storm coming. If God had a place for him, he
believed that he was ready.

The Poem

For at least a decade, JFK’s favorite
poem had been Rendezvous, a
celebration of death. Rendezvous was
by Alan Seeger, an American poet killed in World War One. The poem was Seeger’s
affirmation of his own anticipated death. [For Seeger bio see: (3)]

The refrain of Rendezvous, “I have a rendezvous with
Death,” articulated John Kennedy’s deep sense of his own mortality. Kennedy had
experienced a continuous rendezvous with death in anticipation of his actual
death: from the deaths of his PT boat crew members, from drifting alone in the
dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, from the early deaths of his brother Joe and
sister Kathleen, and from the recurring near-death experiences of his almost
constant illnesses.

He recited Rendezvous to his wife, Jacqueline, in 1953 on their first night
home in Hyannis after their
honeymoon. She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the years.
In the fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old
daughter, Caroline.

I have thought many times about what
then took place in the White House Rose Garden one beautiful fall day.

On the morning of October 5, 1963, President Kennedy met with his
National Security Council....

Caroline suddenly appeared at her
father’s side. She said she wanted to tell him something. He tried to divert
her attention while the meeting continued. Caroline persisted. The president
smiled and turned his full attention to his daughter. He told her to go ahead.
While the members of the National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline
looked into her father’s eyes and said:

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air –
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath –
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ‘twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear….
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

After Caroline said the poem’s final
word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security advisers sat in stunned
silence. One of them said later the bond between father and daughter was so
deep “it was as if there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.”

JFK had heard his own acceptance of
death from the lips of his daughter. While surrounded by a National Security
Council that opposed his breakthrough to peace, the president once again
deepened his pledge not to fail that rendezvous. If God had a place for him, he
believed that he was ready.

So how can the why of his murder give us hope?….asks Douglas,
and it is up to us to answer that question.

The official public record, the White House Diary for
October 5, 1962 does not even reflect that that meeting took place, but it most
certainly did, and the primary topic of conversation was most certainly Cuba,
in particular Clare Booth Luce’s critical commentary that appeared in the issue
of Life Magazine that was released
that day. (4).

The gathering storm that was surely coming was clearly
centered around Cuba, but the Cuban Missile Crisis, as it would become known,
and take the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, had yet to acquire a
name. In the days and weeks that followed however, the President’s faith and
powers would be tested to the max.(5).

That same day, October
5, 1962, a chart was prepared of reconnaissance targets in Cuba
for the CIA’s U2s to photograph (6.), for
analysis by the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) after the
resumption of flights, as discussed that same day by CIA
director John McCone and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. (7.)

It’s possible Oswald or someone he worked with placed the
arrows and captions on those charts.

After the Bay of Pigs, which brought fiasco into the popular
vernacular, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the second major crisis of the Kennedy
administration, and a critical buildup to the June 10, 1963 “Peace Speech” at
American University, when Kennedy laid out his plans for a peaceful future for
all man, but one that was not to be allowed to happen.

Kennedy met his fate on Friday, November 22, 1963 at 12:30 pm, just after high noon on a DealeyPlaza, Dallas,
Texas street, reportedly gunned down by
lone sniper, later, and falsely identified as Lee Harvey Oswald.

There is still an x marked today at the spot on the street
where the lives of President John F. Kennedy and his reputed assassin Harvey Oswald
came together, intersecting at a very specific time and place, and it is only
from an examination of their lives is it possible to really understand how
and why Dealey Plaza happened.

Of course, if Lee Harvey Oswald was a psychotic madman, a
homicidal maniac spree killer who acted spontaneously and without meaning or
motive, none of it would make sense. There would be no connection whatsoever
between the two now historic lines that were left in the wake of their lives,
other than they coincidently intersected at that time and place.

Was the rendezvous at DealeyPlaza a chance, spontaneous,
tragic, coincendental accident of history, or was it planned to happen in
advance? Was the President killed by a Texas Yahoo nutcase, giving his death no
meaning or cause, or was he the victim of a conspiracy that makes him a
martyr?

Seeger was born in New
York to parents from old New England families.
Seeger’s family lived on Staten Island for ten years of
his life before moving to Mexico in
1900. He lived in Mexico
at an impressionable age and this had a decisive impact on his poetry

At age fourteen he returned to New
York for education at the HackleySchool in Tarrytown.
He then went to HarvardCollege
in 1906. He became one of the editors of Harvard Monthly and contributed verse
regularly.

From 1910 to 1912 he lived aimlessly in New
York before moving to Paris.
He became very fond of Paris and,
just after the outbreak of the World War One, he enlisted in the French Foreign
Legion. He served in the trenches on the western front and enjoyed the time on
sentry duty for quiet contemplation. During the Battle
of the Somme he was severely wounded when advancing on
the German lines. He died shortly afterwards and was posthumously awarded the
Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire.

1. McCone reviewed details of the Donovan negotiations,
discussions with the President, Attorney General, Eisenhower, the decisions not
to approach Congressional leadership, the discussion with Senator Javits, and
the final report from Donovan. Bundy expressed general agreement.

2. At the October 4th meeting of the Special Group Mongoose(1) was
discussed in some detail as was the meeting with Carter, Lansdale,
et al. in DCI’s office on that day. McCone
stated there was a feeling in CIA and
Defense that the “activist policy” which founded the Mongoose operation was
gone and that while no specific operational activities had been (refused) the
amount of “noise”from minor incidents such as the sugar, the students firing on
the Havana Hotel and other matters and the extreme caution expressed by State
had led to this conclusion. More importantly, however, the decisions to
restrict U-2 flights had placed the United States Intelligence Community in a
position where it could not report with assurance the development of offensive
capabilities in Cuba.
McCone stated he felt it most probable that Soviet-Castro operations would end
up with an established offensive capability in Cuba including MRBMs. McCone
stated he thought this a probability rather than a mere possibility. Bundy took
issue stating that he felt the Soviets would not go that far, that he was
satisfied that no offensive capability would be installed in Cuba because of
its world-wide effects and therefore seemed relaxed over the fact that the
Intelligence Community cannot produce hard information on this important
subject. McCone said that Bundy’s viewpoint was reflected by many in the
Intelligence Community, perhaps a majority, but he just did not agree and
furthermore did not think the United States could
afford to take such a risk.

3. Bundy then philosophized on Cuba stating that he felt
that our policy was not clear, our objectives not determined and therefore our
efforts were not productive. He discussed both the Mongoose operations and the
Rostow “Track Two”.(2) Bundy
was not critical of either or of the Lansdale
operations. It was obvious that he was not in sympathy with a more active role
such as those discussed at 5412 on Thursday(3) as
he felt none of them would bring Castro down nor would they particularly
enhance U.S. position of world leadership. Bundy seemed inclined to support the
Track Two idea and also inclined (though he was not specific) to play down the
more active Lansdale operation. Bundy had not talked to Lansdale
but obviously had received some of the “static” that is being passed around in Washington.
(Before) McCone in reporting on the discussions at Thursday’s 5412 meeting
repeated the views of the President and expressed by the Attorney General it
was agreed that the whole Government policy with reference to Cuba
must be resolved promptly as basic to further actions on our part. In general,
Bundy’s views were that we should either make a judgment that we would have to
go in militarily (which seemed to him intolerable) or alternatively we would
have to learn to live with Castro, and his Cuba and adjust our policies
accordingly…..

Rendezvous At DealeyPlaza

Rendezvous With Death
At DealeyPlaza – Part II

On October 5, 1962,
the morning that Caroline Kennedy recited the poem “Rendezvous With
Death” to her father at the National Security Council meeting in the Rose
Garden, Lee Harvey Oswald cashed a pay check from Leslie Welding Company, where
he had worked since July 19 but had quit and got a better job at a
graphics arts firm.

One of Oswald’s first acts upon arrival in Fort
Worth in June 1962 was to go to the Texas Employment
Commission and look for work, but he got more than a job from Virginia Hale and
Anna Laurie Smith. Virginia Hale got Oswald the sheet metal worker job at
Leslie Welding, but while he was at the Texas Employment Commission Oswald
asked if they knew of anyone who spoke the Russian language that he and his
wife could meet.

In his article (Oswald’s Handlers) Bill Simpich writes:
“Anna Laurie Smith said that she referred him to Peter Gregory, and ‘Mrs. Hall’
from the next desk, suggested Mrs. Max Clark and provided her name. This Mrs.
Hall was Elena Hall, a Russian immigrant who was also part of the White Russian
community …. Mrs. Elena Hall gave the names of Max and Gali Clark to Oswald at
the TexasEmploymentCenter and then went to work as a
dental lab technician.”

The first person Oswald called was Gali Clark, an excellent
Russian speaker, a former “Russian princess” who Simpich notes “made a point of
shopping for the Oswald family and providing material support, bringing
groceries to Marina at the Hall
residence while Elena Hall recovered from a car accident.” In addition however,
“Mrs. Hall took Marina and her baby in to live at her place during the first
week of October, bought her some clothes and groceries, and had Marina’s
teeth fixed with the financial help of George Bouhe….” And Elena Hall, who went
from the Texas Employment Commission to work at the dental lab.

So besides getting Oswald a job, the one stop at the Texas
Employment Commission got Marina and the baby a nice place to stay, and they
had Marina’s teeth fixed and the
Russian community bought them groceries and gave them financial help,
especially George Bouhe.

But being employed as a laborer was not something Oswald
enjoyed or wanted to do and he told Gali Clark’s husband Max Clark that he
hated his work at Leslie Welding and wanted another line of work. Max Clark was
an attorney and industrial security supervisor at General Dynamics who knew the
FBI agent who later investigated him. Clark referred to
his interviewing agent Earl Haley as “Earl”, and told the Warren Commission
that he was familiar with Haley and the FBI from working with them at General
Dynamics. Clark was an industrial security supervisor at
the Convair wing of General Dynamics, who had the Air Force contract for the
first funded ICBM study.

Max Clark also had a “covert security approval” by the CIA
for “Project ROCK/IDIO/SGAPEX”.

According to DeMohrenschildt, Max Clark told him
he checked with his friends in the FBI and that Oswald was okay. George
DeMohrenschildt testified to the Warren Commission that during one of his
conversation with his Dallas CIA contact J.
Walton Moore, and Moore assured him
that Oswald was a “harmless lunatic”.

After he told Max Clark he didn’t like the Leslie Welding
job Oswald started skipping work altogether, though they still took him back
even after he missed a few days. His boss said that he was going to be trained
in more specialized work, and his last Leslie Welding punch card had “Quit”
written on it, so he wasn’t fired from that job. The job lasted from July 19
until October 8, quite a stretch Oswald.

About Oswald’s work at Leslie Welding, A. J. Weberman
wrote:

In a February 3,
1964, Memorandum to Files, a CIA
component, presumably the Office of Security, stated: “The following notation
appears on the cover of OSWALD’S address book: “Mr. Bargas 200 E.N. Vacey Louv
– K P1316 (The FBI memorandum does not suggest it, but I would think that Louv
– K might possibly refer to Louisville, Kentucky.)
The Office of Security of the CIA came up
with three spurious Bargas’ from its files. [CIA
1300-479] “Bargas” was the name of OSWALD’S foreman at Louv-R-Pac, Thomas
Bargas. Tom Bargas was interviewed in 1977 and asked if he saw Oswald every day
he worked there? He said: “Yeah, I did see him every day. He was a sheet metal
worker, we used to make ventilators. We never had any Government contracts or
anything. It was all commercial buildings. Oswald always kept to himself – he
wore the same old jacket.” In May 1993 Tom Bargas said Oswald never expressed
any political opinions to him and was a good worker. “He was a general flunky –
he did everything we put him to do. Because he comprehended so well, I was
going to teach him to do layout work. Then he quit. No reason…He came in every
day. He worked there two, three months, maybe longer. He didn’t miss any days
that I know of…I never miss work. We went in at 7:00 a.m. and got off at 3:30 p.m.” [WCD 7; FBI DL 89-43 p360 - 1 RPG:mja - UnID;
CIA 1300-479]

While Elena Hall was recouperating from a car crash, Lee and
Marina had her house all to themselves, and one night had the Clarks
over for dinner to thank them for their hospitality. This is when Clark
extensively questioned Oswald about his experiences in the Soviet
Union, what amounted to what Simpich calls a
“debriefing.”

Max Clark’s file states that he “worked closely” with I. B.
Hale, the husband of Virginia Hale, who got Oswald the job at Leslie Welding. A
former FBI agent who was the chief of industrial security at General Dynamics
I.B. Hale and his wife Virginia separated in 1960, with twin sons Bobby and
Billy staying with I.B. and son Thomas staying with Virginia.

But two weeks after I.B. Hale’s wife Virginia got Oswald a
job, in August 1962, their sons traveled across state lines in order to
break-in at the apartment of Judith Campbell (Exner), who was on an intimate
basis with President John F. Kennedy as well as Mafia chieftains Sam Giancana
and Johnny Rosselli. The break in at Campbell’s
apartment was done in full view of an FBI stakeout team who checked out the Texas
tags on the burglar’s car and recognized the sons of the Texas
state football star and former FBIagentI. B. Hale.

As Simpich reasonably concludes, it seems that Hale and his
sons “got caught up in a dramatic series of events that appear to have been
designed to blackmail the Kennedy Administration into approving General
Dynamics as the prime contactor over Boeing to build the TFX
F-111 bomber at their Fort Worth
plant. At the time this 7 billion dollar contract was the largest military
contract in history.” In addition, one of the Hale boys had run off with the daughter
of Texas Governor John Connally, and killed her by accident, or so the official
reports concluded.

So in early October, 1962, Oswald was still working at the
job at Leslie Welding, Marina was staying at Mrs. Halls while she recovered
from an auto accident, and the other Russians give them food and financial
assistance. But no one seemed to know where Oswald was staying. He didn’t stay
at the Halls with Marina, and only
stayed a few days at the YMCA, but there’s no record of where he stayed for weeks
at a time during this period. The FBI even went back to interview every one of
the White Russians Oswald met at this time and asked them one question, – do
they know where Oswald was staying in October to early November, 1962? And
every one said no.

According to Weberman, “Oswald checked out of the YMCA
on October 19, 1962,
and from October 19, 1962 to November 2, 1962, his address was a
mystery to the Warren Commission. The Warren Report noted: “After Oswald left
the YMCA on October 19, 1962,
he moved to a room or apartment somewhere in Dallas which
has not been located. It seems likely that during that time he spent several
weekends with Marina at
the Hall house.”

On October 9, 1962,
Oswald went back to the offices of the Texas Employment Commission and asked to
see Helen Cunningham, a counselor with the commission who he had been referred
by Teofil Miller. Miller had been to a dinner party with the Oswalds learned of
his search for a job, and had called Mrs. Cunningham, a friend of his, and
asked her to help Oswald get a job more suited to his skills and background.

After skipping out on the Leslie Welding job, without
notice, Oswald was still owed two pay checks for the last days he had worked,
and the frugal Oswald wanted the money but didn’t want to have to go back to
pick it up in person. So on October 9,
1962, the same day he put in for a new job with Mrs. Cunningham at
the ever helpful Texas Employment Commission, Oswald walked into the Main Post
Office in Dallas and ordered a post
office box. He paid less than $5, used his real name Lee Harvey Oswald
[See: Receipt for PO Box MFA] and as a
residence he gave the Dallas
address of DeMohrenschildt’s daughter Alexandria
and her husband Gary Taylor.

[BK Note: Mary Ferrell asks “Is this his first act of
deception?,” but I don’t think so, it was not an act of deception if he asked
Gary Taylor if he could use his address to take out the PO box and as an
address to give J/C/S, which also had Taylor’s address as Oswald’s address until
he took out the PO box. So ,no there was no first act of deception in using Taylor’s
address here.]

Oswald was given P.O. Box 2915 and either one or two keys
[See: Reference 1 and Receipt 2]. He then contacted Leslie Welding and asked
them to send his final pay checks to that PO Box.

When Oswald endorsed his last two checks from Louv-R-Pac, he
used the address of Gary Taylor. Although he never stayed there, Taylor had
given Oswald permission to use his address and he did so on his Post Office box
application and at Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval, his next job.

According to A. J. Weberman: Some of the signatures on
the back of the Louv-R-Pac paychecks were not OSWALD’S. The FBI Laboratory
examined the endorsements and compared them against the signature on OSWALD’S
passport. They did not match, although Oswald had used his passport as
identification to cash these checks, and his passport number was written on
each one. The FBI stated: “Under date of December 5, 1963, the FBI Laboratory advised that the
handprinting and handwriting of LEE HARVEY
OSWALD, available in Bureau files, have been searched (Deleted) without
effecting an identification.”…The HSCA examined 63 specimens of OSWALD’S
signature, but none of the signatures on the Louv-R-Pac paychecks, although
their existence had been brought to the attention of the HSCA by this
researcher. The HSCA chose instead to examine: “A letter dated July 13, 1962,
to Leslie Welding Co. signed LEE H. OSWALD;
written on part of the page from a yellow legal pad. Blue ink. Ball point pen.
Location: Archives.” [HSCA V8 p230]

George DeMohrenschildt had promised Oswald he would try to
get him a good job that he would like, and through Teofil Miller and Mrs.
Cunningham, that turned out to be at the Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval, a graphic arts
firm.

Besides doing most of the advertising and commercial
graphics for Dallas businesses,
J/C/S also did classified work for the U.S. Army Map Service, placing numbers,
names and captions on photographs, including high altitude photos taken by the
U2 over Russia
and Cuba.

A fellow employee, Dennis Ofstbin recalled that when they
placed the names of some cities in Russia
on a map, Oswald said he had been there.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October, 1962, when no
one knew where Oswald was living, he was working at a company that placed
arrows and captions on photos taken by the U2 over Cuba, and J/C/S workers,
including Oswald, may have placed the arrows and captions on the very props
that were used to brief the President, and the President used to brief Congress
and the UN during the crisis.

It was while working at J/C/S that Oswald wrote the word
“microdot” in his notebook, and it was while working at J/C/S when Oswald is
said to have had the opportunity to produce the multiple faked IDs and
documents, some of which included the use of the alias A. J. Hidell.

It was at a party of DeMohrenchildt’s friends who worked at
Magnolia Oil Co. in February 1963 when Oswald and his wife Marina met Ruth
Paine and Volkmar Schmidt.

Just as Simpich describes how George Bouhe handed
responsibility for Oswald over to George DeMohrenschildt in the fall of 1962,
DeMohrenschildt was handing the Oswalds over to Ruth and Michael Paine, who
would play increasingly central roles in the coincidences that would lead up to
the Rendezvous at Dealey Plaza.

While Ruth and Marina bonded at the party, Oswald talked to
Volkmar Schmidt, a German who worked at Magnolia Oil with most of the other
people at the party. In their long conversation, Schmidt talked with Oswald
about the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, and suggested that the same should be
done to other fascists, like Army General Edwin Walker.

Within a few weeks of his conversation with Schmidt, Oswald
ordered a rifle from an advertisement in a gun magazine, sending a money order
as payment and having the rifle sent to A.J. Hidell, P.O.
Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.
He had previously, in early January, ordered a .38 revolver, and though ordered
a month apart, they were both shipped the same day, March 20, 1963, to Oswald’s PO box.

What’s odd is that Hidell wasn’t authorized to receive mail
at that PO box and no one who works at the post office recalls Oswald
retrieving the packages that contained the pistol or the package with a rifle
and scope. And the receipt is missing, said to have been routinely destroyed
when the box was closed, although such records are normally kept and Post
Office regulations require them to be kept for two years. Another odd thing is
that Oswald would have had to pick up the package that was sent to A. J.
Hidell, and would ostensibly need Hidell’s identification to pick up the
package, which was sent to a P.O. Box that belonged to Oswald, not Hidell.

The Warren Commission maintains that Oswald mailed the money
order for the rifle, postmarked March 12, and reportedly picked it up on March
25, both Tuesdays when Oswald was supposed to be at work at
Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval.

Unlike his job at the TSBD, where they didn’t have a Time
Card to punch in, J/C/S was pretty serious about keeping track of what they’re
employees were doing and for whom.

Also please note that on the morning that Oswald was
supposed to have mailed the money order for the rifle, he worked on a job for
Sam Bloom, the same guy who helped John Connally and the Secret Service choose
the Trade Mart over the Women’s building and thus have the motorcade drive by
the TSBD.

Usually it is Conspiracy Theorists who accuse witnesses like
Harry Holmes, who also delayed Oswald leaving the DPD long enough for Ruby to
get into position to kill him, of lying. Holmes knew the PO regulation
was to maintain such records for two years, and he keeps saying “They” did this
and “They” did that. Who’s “They.” And what happened to the person who handed
the rifle over the counter to Oswald/Hidell? They don’t have Post Officer
records who tell them who was working that day?

Using a background construction site and the fact that
Oswald worked six days a week at J/C/S, the official investigators concluded
that Oswald took the photos of Walker’s
house and neighborhood on a Sunday, before he ordered the rifle.

But instead of using the same logic to determine when he
ordered and picked up the weapons from the Post Office, we are advised by the
author of the official Chronology not to trust the Time Sheets of J/C/S because
Oswald “lied” on them. But they didn’t ask Stovall if he allowed his employees
to leave the premises and run around Dallas
mailing money orders and picking up weapons at the Post Office.

Using a coupon clipped from the February issue of American
Rifleman magazine, Lee went to the main post office and ordered a high-powered
Italian carbine, called a Mannlicher-Carcano, from Klein’s Sporting Goods
Company, a mail order house in Chicago.
He sent the coupon air mail with a postal money order for $21.78 for the rifle,
$7.17 for the scope, to be moounted by a gunsmith employed by Klein’s and $1.50
for postage and handling). The rifle was delivered to an “A. HIDELL, Post
Office Box 2915, Dallas,
Texas.”

(FN: Oswald’s time sheet on 12 March is evidence that he
probably lied sometimes about his hours. On the day he ordered the rifle, he
signed in from 8:00 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., (Exhibit no. 1855, Vol. 23, p.
605). The U.S. Postal Inspector, Dallas, Harry D. Holmes, later testified that
OSWALD’S order for the rifle was issued “early on the morning of March 12″. This appears to have been the case, for the order was imprinted on
Klein’s cash register March 13. Since the post office window opened only at 8:00 a.m., OSWALD probably lied when he signed
in then. Thus the time sheets have to be used with caution. M&L….”

But instead of Oswald lying on his time sheets, could Oswald
have left the premises and if he wrote “Sam Bloom” on the account sheet, could
he have run copy or graphics over to the Bloom office for approval during the
half hour- hour time that he said he worked on their project?

That would get Oswald out of the building and in a position
to mail the money order and or pick up the weapons. But it would also put
Oswald in contact with people at Sam Bloom, the company owned by the man who, a
year later, would help arrange for the President’s motorcade to ride past the
Texas School Book Depository, a key element in the string of coincidences that
led up to the Rendezvous With Death At Dealey Plaza.

[BK Note: Checking with Vincent Bugliosi, who wrote 2,000
pages of Reclaiming History on
how Oswald killed JFK all by himself, you would think he would have devoted a
few pages to how Oswald obtained the rifle, but without any witnesses,
documents, records or any evidence Oswald actually did so, the Bug simply
ignores all this and sums it all up in writing: “By coincidence, both weapons,
pistol and carbine, were shipped to him on the same day a little over a week later,
on March 20. Marina noticed the
rifle several days later in Lee’s ‘office.’ He later draped a coat over it for
concealment.”]

How come there isn’t one post office employee or witness who
remembers handing a rifle and pistol over the counter to Oswald, and with the
pistol, if it was collect on delivery, Oswald had to hand money over for it,
and nobody can recall this interaction with the most famous assassin on the
planet?

Monday, January 21, 2013

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Non-Violence and Political Assassination - By William Kelly

Today January 21,
2013 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a national holiday and
inauguration day, when Barrack Obama, the first black president is sworn in for
a second term using Martin Luther King, Jr.’s bible. In addition, for his
invocation, Obama has chosen not a preacher, not a lawyer, but the widow of the
assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Evers was shot by Brian DeBeckwith with a high powered rifle
in front of his Mississippi home
in 1963, but DeBeckwith was acquitted by an all white jury, and only later
convicted decades later because of the tireless efforts of his widow and the
courageous prosecution by an assistant
district attorney. If Evers’ assassination was properly prosecuted immediately,
it is my belief that President Kennedy would not have been killed the way he
was, by a similar sniper in a southern city.

Before he was killed in Memphis King was the victim of an
assassination attempt in New York City
where he was attacked by a women with a knife when signing copies of his first
book. While he was in intensive care in the hospital, the New York Times
reported that the knife almost severed his main artery, in which case he would
have died if he had sneezed. In Memphis on the stormy night before his own
assassination, King gave his last speech in which he recounted recuperating
from the knife wound in the hospital and receiving many letters of support from
the president, the governor of New York and others, the contents of which he
forgot, but he didn’t forget the letter from a 9th grade white girl
from White Plaines, NY high school, who
wrote simply that she was glad he didn’t sneeze.

Indeed, it was while at Crozier on Sunday, June 10, 1950 when King and three friends
visited Mary’s Café in Maple Shade, in Camden
County, New Jersey, and were
refused service by a gun wielding bar owner. They filed charges against him,
King’s first known reaction to blatant racism and the moment that he is said to
have decided to devote his life to the cause of civil rights, not just the
civil rights of blacks but the civil rights of all people. See: http://csopassassinations.blogspot.com/2013/01/mlk-in-south-jersey.html

Klotz, who writes from the Absecon Island (Atlantic City)
Downbeach town of Margate, would be interested to know that King’s most well
know speech, “I Had a Dream,” was co-authored by Clarence Jones.

Jones, an influential civil rights lawyer and close aide and
associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a book “Behind the Dream,” the story of King’s famous March on Washington speech
at Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963. Besides preparing the notes for the
speech, and ensuring it was copyrighted, Jones stood by King when the speech
was delivered, and his book tells the story of how it all came about.

Now a scholar in residence at the MLKCenter at StanfordUniversity,
Jones has recently done some radio interviews with BBC and
National Public Radio in which he recounts some of what is in the book. Most
interesting is the background of Clarence Jones himself.Born in Philadelphia,
Jones’ parents were live-in domestic servants in an apparently well to do
Philadelphia home, so young Jones was sent off to a Catholic boarding school
where most of the students were orphans, educated by Irish nuns who Jones
credits with teaching him how to write well.

One summer however, while visiting his parents at the summer home of their
employer in Longport, NJ, the upper crust Downbeach town next to Margate, young
Jones went for a bike ride, only to be intercepted by some young white boys who
harassed him, calling him “nigger,” “honkey,” “boogaloo,” “monkey,” and things
that he had never been confronted with before.

When his mother found him crying, and he told her why, she made him look in a
mirror and asked what he saw – telling him “you are the most beautiful thing in
God’s creation,” and such taunting no longer affected him as it did that day in
Longport.

Having been educated so well by the Irish nuns, Jones attended ColumbiaUniversity
and after being drafted and given an undesirable discharge for refusing to sign
an anti-Communist loyalty oath, he studied law and became a lawyer. Moving
to California, one day in
1960 Martin Luther King visited him at home, and tried to persuade him to
assist him in defending against a trumped up tax evasion case, but Jones turned
him down because his wife was pregnant and he didn’t want to move back east. After
being berated by his wife however, Jones attended the church service where King
gave the sermon on the subject of the responsibilities of black professionals
to assist other less fortunate blacks, after which Jones joined King’s legal
team.

Without success, at least so far, I have tried to find out
the name and current whereabouts of the young 9th grade girl from
White Planes high school who wrote to King to say she is glad he didn’t sneeze,
but I did correspond via email with Clarence Jones, who said that the name of
the family whose Longport home his mother worked as a housekeeper was
Lippincott, a Quaker family who owned the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall (Now Resorts).

With some effort, I did find a partial transcript of the
speech King gave at Cape May, but have yet to learn if
there is an existing audiotape or film of the event.

.

In 1958, before he became a national spokesman for civil
rights. King visited Cape May, where he gave a
speech to a convention of Quaker Friends on the topic of Non-Violence and
Racial Justice.

At a time when blacks were beginning to break segregation
laws that called for separate schools, rest rooms and water fountains, and
prevented blacks from sitting in the front of the bus or at the lunch counter,
King called for non-violence resistance, and not to resort to violence. He
called for everyone to love those enemies who espoused hate, and to “fulfill
the dreams of our democracy.”

Although the call for non-violence resistance went unheeded
with the violent response to the Birmingham bombing, the murders of white civil
rights workers and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm
X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, King’s Cape May speech is
powerful and moving and indicates the synthesis of his thoughts and ideas that
were later personified in his later work and more recognized sermons and
speeches.

While I have yet to find any news reports of King’s visit to
Cape May, to learn where the Convention was held, if he stayed overnight and if
so where, and have not found a film or audio tape of the speech, I did find a partial
transcript of it in the Friends Journal of July 26, 1958.

It should also be noted that on June 28-July 5, 2008, the annual Gathering of Friends
met in Johnstown, Pa
to celebrate the 50th anniversary of MLK’s
address Nonviolence and Racial Justice to Friends at Cape
May, NJ in 1958.

It is impossible to look out into the wide arena of American
life without noticing a real crisis in race relations. This crisis has been
precipitated, on the one hand, by the determined resistance of reactionary
elements in the South to the Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in
the public schools.

This resistance has often risen to ominous proportions. Many
states have risen up in open defiance. The legislative halls of the South ring
loud with such words as "interposition" and
"nullification." The Ku Klux Klan is on the march again and that
other so-called Respectable White Citizens' Councils. Both of these organizations have as their
basic aim to defeat and stand in the way of the implementation of the Supreme
Court's decision on desegregation. They are determined to preserve segregation
at any cost. So all of these forces have conjoined to make for massive
resistance.

But interestingly enough, the crisis has been precipitated,
on the other hand, by radical change in the Negro's evaluation of himself. There
would be no crisis in race relations if the Negro continued to think of himself
in inferior terms and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. But it is
at this very point that the change has come.

Something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it
possible and necessary for him to travel more; with the coming of the
automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, and a great depression, his rural
plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His cultural life was
gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. And even
his economic life was rising through the growth of industry and other
influences. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves, and the
Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God
loves all of His children and that all men are made in His image. And so he
came to see that the important thing about a man is not his specificity but his
fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the
texture and quality of his soul.

Since the struggle for freedom and human dignity will
continue, the question is this: How will the struggle for racial justice be
waged? What are the forces that will be
at work?

What is the method that will be used? What will the oppressed peoples of the world
do in this struggle to achieve racial justice?

There are several answers to this question, but I would like
to deal with only two. One is that the oppressed peoples of the earth can
resort to the all-too-prevalent method of physical violence and corroding
hatred. We all know this method; we're
familiar with it. It is something of the inseparable twin of Western
materialism. It has even become the hallmark of its Grandeur.

Now I cannot say that violence never wins any victories; it
occasionally wins victories. Nations
often receive their independence through the use of violence. But violence only
achieves temporary victory; it never can achieve ultimate peace. It creates
many more social problems than it solves. And violence ends up defeating
itself. Therefore it is my firm conviction that if the Negro succumbs to the
temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations
will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness. And our chief legacy to the future will be an
endless reign of meaningless chaos.

The other method that is open to oppressed people as they
struggle for racial justice is the method of nonviolent resistance, made famous
in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi of India,
who used it effectively to free his people from political domination, the
economic exploitation, and humiliation inflicted upon them by Britain.
There are several things we can say about this method. First, it is not a method of cowardice, of
stagnant passivity; it does resist. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed
to the evil that he is resisting as the violent resister.

He resists evil, but he resists it without violence. This
method is strongly active. It is true that it is passive in the sense that the
nonviolent resister is never physically aggressive toward the opponent, but the
mind is always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is
wrong.

This method does not seek to defeat and humiliate the
opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. Occasionally, the
nonviolent resister will engage in boycotts and

noncooperation. But noncooperation and boycotts are not ends
within themselves; they are merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within
the oppressor and to awaken his dozing conscience. The end is redemption; the
end is reconciliation. And so the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of
the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The
method of nonviolence is directed at the
forces of evil rather than at the
individuals caught in the forces of evil. The nonviolent resister seeks to
defeat evil systems rather than individuals who are victimized by the evil
systems.

The nonviolent resister accepts suffering without
retaliation. He willingly accepts suffering. The nonviolent resister realizes
that unearned suffering is redemptive; he is willing to receive violence, but
he never goes out as a perpetrator of violence. He comes to see that suffering
does something to the sufferer as well as the inflictor of the suffering.

Somehow the Negro must come to the point that he can say to
his white brothers who would use violence to prevent integration, "We will
match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.
We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we
cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. Do to us what you may, and we will still love
you. Bomb our homes and spit upon our children, and we will still love
you.

Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our
communities after midnight hours, and
take us out on some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half dead, and we
will still love you. Go all over the
nation with your propaganda and make it appear that we are not fit morally or
culturally or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you. But we will wear you down by our capacity to
suffer, and one day we will win our freedom, and we will not only win freedom
for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will
win you in the process, and therefore our victory will be a double
victory."

That is another basic thing about nonviolent resistance. The
nonviolent resister not only avoids external physical violence, but he avoids
internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he
refuses to hate him. The oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the
temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. We must somehow
come to see that this leads us only deeper and deeper into the mire; to return
hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of hate and evil in the
universe.

So somehow people in this universe must have sense enough
and morality enough to return love for hate.

Now when I speak of love, I am not talking about some
sentimental affectionate emotion.

I'm talking about something much deeper. In the Greek
language there are three words for love. The Greek, for instance, talks about
Eros, a sort of aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his
dialogues, a yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come to
us as romantic love. Therefore we know about Eros. We have lived with Eros.

And the Greek language talks about philia, which is also a
type of love we have experienced. It is an intimate affection between personal
friends; it's a reciprocal love. On this
level we love because we are loved; we love people because we like them, we
have things in common. And so we all
experience this type of love.

Then the Greek language comes out with another word for
love; it calls it agape, creative, understanding, redemptive good will for all
men. It is a spontaneous love which seeks nothing in return; it's an
overflowing love. Theologians would say that it is the love of God working in
the lives of men. When we rise to love on this level, we love men not because
we like them, not because their ways appeal to us; we love them because God
loves them. We come to the point that we love the person who does the evil deed
while hating the deed the person does. And I believe that this is what Jesus
meant when

He said, "Love your enemies."

The nonviolent resister has faith in the future. He somehow believes that the universe is on the
side of justice. So he goes about his way, struggling for man's humanity to
man, struggling for justice, for the triumph of love, because of this faith in
the future and this assurance that he has cosmic companionship as he struggles.

Call it what you may, whether it is Being Itself, with Paul
Tillich, or the Principle of Concretion with Whitehead, or whether it is a
Process of Integration with Wieman, or whether it is a sort of impersonal
Brahman with Hinduism, or whether it is a personal God with boundless power and
infinite love, there is something in this universe that works in every moment
to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole. There is
a power that seeks to bring low prodigious hilltops of evil and pull down
gigantic mountings of injustice, and this is the faith, this is the hope that
can keep us going amid the tension and the darkness of any moment of social
transition. We come to see that the dark of the moral universe is long but it
bends toward justice. This is the faith and the hope that will keep us going.

The nonviolent resister sees within the universe something
at the core and the heartbeat of the moral cosmos that makes for togetherness.
There is something in this universe which justifies James Russell Lowell in
saying,

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim
unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

So down in Montgomery, Alabama,
we can walk and never get weary, because we know there is a great camp meeting
in the promised land of freedom and justice.

The problem of race is certainly the chief moral dilemma of
our nation. We are faced now with the tremendous responsibility of solving this
problem before it is too late. The state of the world today does not permit us
the luxury of an anemic democracy, and the clock of destiny is ticking out. We
must solve this problem before it is too late. We must go out once more and
urge all men of good will to get to work, urge all the agencies of our nation,
the federal government, white liberals of the North, white moderates of the
South, organized labor, the church and all religious bodies, and the Negro
himself.

And all these agencies must come together to work hard now
to bring about the
fulfillment of the
dream of our
democracy. Social progress does not roll in on the wheels of
inevitability. It comes only through persistent work and the tireless efforts
of dedicated individuals. Without this persistent work time it becomes the ally
of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social
stagnation.

I think of the great work that has been done by the Society
of Friends. It gives all of us who struggle for justice new hope, and I simply
say to you this evening: continue in that struggle, continue with that same
determination, and continue with that same faith in the future.

Modern psychology has a word that is used probably more than
any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted."

All of us are desirous of living the well-adjusted life. I
know I am, and we must be concerned about living a well adjusted life in order
to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But I say to you, as I come to my close, that there are
certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted,
and I call upon you to be maladjusted to all of these things.

I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and
discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob rule.
I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessities
from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to adjust
myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical
violence.

I call upon you to be maladjusted to each of these things.
It may be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.
So let us be maladjusted. As maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst
of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the
generations, "Let judgment run down like waters, and righteousness like a
mighty stream."

As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see
that this nation could not exist half slave and half free.

As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of
an age amazingly adjusted to slavery
could cry out in words lifted to cosmic proportions, "All men are created
equal, [and]...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
[and]... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look at the
men of his generation and cry out, "Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you."

Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from
the bleak and desolate midnight of
man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and
justice. This is what stands ahead. We've made progress, and it is great
progress that we must make if we are to fulfill the dreams of our democracy,
the dreams of Christianity, the dreams of the great religions of the world.

I close by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher
who didn't have his grammar quite right. But he uttered words with profound
meaning. The words were in the form of a prayer: "Lord, we ain't what we
want to be, we ain't what we ought to be, we ain't what we gonna' to be, but
thank God, we ain't what we was."
And so tonight I say, "We ain't what we ought to be, but thank God
we ain't what we was."

And let us continue, my friends, going on and on toward that
great city where all men will live together as brothers in respected dignity
and worth of all human personality. This will be a great day, a day,
figuratively speaking, when the "morning stars will sing together, and the
sons of God will shout for joy.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., is President of the Montgomery,
Alabama, Improvement Association. His moving address as given here is
somewhat cut. In some of the passages deleted from the first part he spoke of
the 50,000 Negro citizens of Montgomery who had ultimately found it "more
honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation," summarized the
history of the Negro in America from 1619 through the nineteenth century, and
linked the struggle of the American Negro to attain human dignity with the
revolt of oppressed peoples all over the world, particularly in Asia and
Africa.

In Dallas on the
night of the assassination, one copy of the Zapruder film of the assassination of
President Kennedy was hand delivered to the Grand Prarie Naval Air Station
where a jet pilot flew it to WashingtonD.C.

The film was taken to either the FBI or Secret Service headquarters and it was viewed, but since the FBI and Secret Service aren't in the business of analyzing
film, two Secret Service agents took it to the new state-of-the-art facility at the National Photo
Interpretation Center (NPIC) at the Navy Yard. There it was turned over to Dino
Brugioni. Brugioni's team analyzed it and made still enlargements of select
individual frames that were mounted on briefing boards. They worked on the film
throughout the night and in the morning the director of the NPIC Art Lundal, took
the briefing boards to the CIA Headquarters.

NPIC Z-FILM BRIEFING PANEL #1
This briefing board is similar to but not one of the briefing boards used by Lundal to brief John McCone
[For more background on the Z-Film at NPIC see: JFKCountercoup2: Z-Film at NPIC Event #1

Art Lundal’s October 1962 briefing to JFK on U2 photo evidence
of Soviet missiles in Cuba
set off the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was so impressed with Lundal’s briefing
he sent Lundal to London and Paris
to brief the US Ambassador David Bruce and the Prime Minister and French President Charles DeGaul. The
content of Lundal’s briefing to CIA director
John McCone on the assassination is unknown, but it was ostensibly based on the NPIC analysis of the
Zapruder film and the reports of the Secret Service agents who witnessed the
assassination.

But when McCone went to the White House to brief the
President on the assassination and the international situation, he found
LBJ in the basement Situation Room monitoring reports from Dallas.
When LBJ saw McCone, he waved him off and declined to see him. LBJ didn’t need to know anything the CIA
had to say about the assassination or anything else.

Dino Brugioni of the NPIC

Brugioni wrote: "McCone found Lyndon Johnson colorless
and crude in intelligence matters and, as president, clumsy and heavy-handed in
international affairs. Instead of personally carefully considering prepared
intelligence memorandums on intelligence matters, he preferred to be briefed by
trusted advisors. Increasingly, the president sought intelligence information
almost exclusively from Secretary McNamara and the Defense Department. McCone's
advice simply was no longer actively sought by the president. His role
diminished, his influence faded, and the ready access he had enjoyed during the
Kennedy administration became very limited…"

While LBJ wasn’t interested in what the CIA
had to say about the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy was inquisitively concerned, and a few
weeks later, on December 9, RFK crossed paths with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
a close aide and advisor to President Kennedy. When Kennedy’s casket was moved
from the White House to the Capitol for the state funeral, RFK asked
Schlesinger if the casket should be opened or closed. Schlesinger looked at the
dead president’s lifeless body and waxed face and said it should be closed, and
RFK agreed.

When they met on December 9th, Schlesinger asked
RFK what he thought about the assassination, and in his journal Schlesinger
wrote: “I asked him, perhaps tactlessly about Oswald. He said there could be no
serious doubt that he was guilty, but there still was argument whether he did
it by himself or as a part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by
gangsters. He said the FBI people thought he had done it by himself, but that
McCone thought there were two people involved in the shooting.” (published in
2007 as Journals 1952-2000 (Penguin Press, Diary entry December 9, 1963
page 184),

That the Director of the CIA
would tell the Attorney General he thought “there were two people involved in
the shooting,” was not just a personal belief or an unsubstantiated opinion, it was a determination
based on the NPIC analysis of the Zapruder film and the reports of the Secret
Service agents who witnessed the assassination and said that the President and
Governor Connally were hit by separate shots, indicating there was more
than one gunman.

Schlesinger: I asked him, perhaps tactlessly about Oswald.
He said there could be no serious doubt that he was guilty, but there still was
argument whether he did it by himself or as a part of a larger plot, whether
organized by Castro or by gangsters. He said the FBI people thought he had done
it by himself, but that McCone thought there were two people involved in the
shooting.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. set off a firestorm of media and
critical reaction after being interviewed in a public program at the Winspear
Opera House in Dallas by saying
that neither he nor his father believed that a “lone-gunman” killed President
Kennedy.

Interviewed by Charlie Rose, Kennedy was also quoted as
saying, “…When they examined Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald’s phone records,…they
saw…an inventory of the Mafia leaders that they had been investigating…”

A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, Paul Schrade, who was
wounded in the same barrage of bullets that killed RFK, asked if the tape will
be aired or a transcript of it released and they said they are waiting for
permission from Kennedy and Charlie Rose. In the meantime, we are left with the quotes attributed to
those who were there in the audience. Rodger Jones, an editorial writer for the
Dallas News, in an apparent attempt to put the complete interview in context, wrote:

“RFK Jr.’s assassination narrative began with an anecdote
about his dad seeing New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s photo on a newsstand and
asking an aide if there was anything to Garrison’s theories about the CIA,
Cuba and Mafia
in his brother’s killing. RFK Jr. said his dad was told that Garrison was on to
something, but ‘the specifics of Garrison’s investigation went on the wrong
track, but he thought there was a link …’ Kennedy said his dad put
investigators on it. When they examined Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald’s phone
records,… they saw what was essentially ‘an inventory of the Mafia leaders that
they had been investigating for the past two years at the Justice Department.”

In response Jean Davison, and others, including Gary Mack
and John McAdams, have questioned Kennedy’s facts, evidence and reasoning. While
Mack said he believes that Betsy Lewis’ condescending version of the Opera
House event is better (See: Dallas Observer, Jan. 12; “Not Even Charlie Rose
Could Rein in RFK, Jr. in Dallas Last Night.”) and McAdams calls Kennedy a
“crackpot” for his silly beliefs on other subjects, Davison gives a more reasoned
response. As the author of the book “Oswald’s
Game,” which attempts to portray Oswald as the lone assassin, she is known
as a meticulous researcher and accurate writer, but one who comes to an
unpopular and wrong conclusion concerning Oswald’s singular guilt.

Davison correctly notes: “This stood out to me: ‘...phone
records of Oswald ... 'were like an inventory' of mafia leaders...’ Of course,…Oswald
had no phone records since he never had a phone. Anyone can believe in a
conspiracy, but where is the evidence? If Robert Kennedy ‘had investigators do
research into the assassination,’ are Ruby's phone records (or Oswald's
nonexistent ones) really the best they could come up with?...belief isn't
evidence, is it?”

Belief isn’t evidence, but telephone records are evidence,
hard evidence that can be introduced in a court of law, and the fact that there are
no telephone records of the alleged assassin of the President certainly
supports the contention that the Warren Commission investigation was, in
Kennedy’s words, “a shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”

While the phone records aren’t the best evidence of
conspiracy and Oswald may not have had his own telephone, he certainly did make
telephone calls, including suspicious calls worthy of further examination, and
there is substantial documentation to support this.

And we do have Jack Ruby’s extensive telephone records that
clearly show in the weeks leading up to the assassination he had telephone conversations with a number of mobsters who were being actively investigated by
Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department.

As for Oswald, in late April 1963, Ruth Paine drove him to
the Dallas bus terminal where he
caught a bus to his hometown, New Orleans.
Once there, Oswald called his uncle Charles “Dutz” Murret, who lent him money
and offered to assist him in relocating his family.

According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA), “Oswald's uncle, Charles Murret (commonly known as
"Dutz") had for some time been involved in the New
Orleans gambling circles. The committee established
that he was associated with organized crime figures there, having worked for
years in an underworld gambling syndicate affiliated with the Carlos Marcello
crime family….the committee first received information relating to Charles
Murret's underworld involvement from a former prosecution witness against
Teamster leader James R. Hoffa,…”

At the time both Carlos Marcello and Jimmy Hoffa were
subjects of RFK’s Justice Department investigations and both were prosecuted in
Federal courts.

After Oswald was arrested in New
Orleans for getting into a street scuffle with
anti-Castro Cuban members of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE),
he called his uncle Dutz and was bailed out by Emile Bruneau, an associate
of Nofilo Pecora, one of the mobsters who had telephone conversations with Jack Ruby.

Oswald also made other telephone calls that were of
investigative interest.

Oswald reportedly called New York City
radio talk show host Long John Nebel and a Florida
radio program, to talk about Cuban matters.

On September 25,
1963, after leaving New Orleans,
ostensibly for Mexico City, Oswald
placed a phone call to Horace Twiford, a longshoreman and official of the Texas
Socialist Labor Party in Houston.

Later
that week someone impersonating Oswald twice called the Russian Embassy in Mexico
City, but tape recordings of that call, which later
disappeared, were heard by FBI agents familiar with Oswald’s voice and they
claimed it wasn’t him.

Back in Dallas,
Oswald lived for a week at the home of Mary Bledsoe, whose telephone we know he
used because she complained that she didn’t like the fact “Oswald talked on the
phone in a foreign language.”

On November 17,
1963 Ruth Paine called Oswald’s rooming house in Oak Cliff and a
few days later Oswald called Marina
at Mrs. Paine’s home from the rooming house, but you will not find any phone
records of Mrs. Bledsoe’s home or the Oak Cliff rooming house among the records
of the Warren Commission.

After Oswald began working at the Texas School Book
Depository (TSBD) a secretary there said that Oswald once received a long
distance person to person phone call and that he often asked for change to make
phone calls from the pay phone on the first floor. TSBD foreman William Shelley
said he saw Oswald between 11:50 and
12 noon on November 22, standing next
to that telephone, as if waiting for a call.

Once arrested, from the Dallas City Jail, Oswald made a number
of telephone calls, at least two to Mrs. Paine’s home in Irving, one to New
York attorney John Abt, and a call that lasted a long
time to a yet unidentified party. He also tried to call a mysterious John Hurt
of North Carolina, but did not
get through to him.

The Warren Commission, despite conducting a shoddy
investigation, did collect Jack Ruby’s telephone records as well as the phone
records of some of his associates, which proved to be of investigative
significance.

The HSCA reviewed Ruby’s phone records more closely and
investigators noticed a pronounced spike in the increase in Ruby’s calls in the
days and weeks leading up to the assassination. “A chronological consolidation
of the telephone calls made by Ruby from the five separate business and home telephones he used
uncovered a significant increase in the number of calls made in October and November
1963. The average number lept from around 25 to 35 in the months of May
through September to approximately 75 in October and approximately 96 during the
first 3 1/2 weeks of November.”

Many of these calls were to or received from known mobsters
and union racketeers, some of whom were being investigated by RFK’s Justice
Department, including Barney Barker,
Dusty Miller, Lenny Patrick, Dave Yaras, Lewis McWillie, Irwin S. Weiner
and Nofio Pecora.

Barney Barker was a boxer, ex-convict and “one of Hoffa’s
best known associates during the McClellan Committee investigation,” when RFK
was the chief counsel to that committee which “detailed Baker’s role as Hoffa’s
personal liaison to various Mafia figures, as well as to a number of well-known
syndicate executioners.” As counsel to
the committee RFK noted that, “sometimes the mere threat of [Baker’s] presence
in a room was enough to silence the men who would otherwise have opposed
Hoffa’s reign.”

Dusty Miller was another Hoffa assistant and head of the
Teamster’s southern conference, while Lenny Patrick was “one of the Chicago
Mafia’s leading assassins and was responsible, according to Federal and State
law enforcement files, for the murders of over a dozen victims of the mob.” Patrick
was a capo under Chicago mob boss
Sam Giancana.

Dave Yaras, like Patrick, was a childhood friend of Ruby from his old Chicago
neighborhood, and “was overheard in a 1962 electronic surveillance discussing
various underworld murder contracts he had carried out and one he had only
recently been assigned.”

Lewis McWillie moved from Dallas to
Cuba in 1958 to
work in the Havana gambling casinos
owned by Meyer Lansky and Santos Trafficante. Ruby visited him in Cuba
on a number of occasions and returned with cash that he deposited in a Miami
bank for McWillie’s boss.

Irwin Weiner was a Chicago
bail bondsman and close associate of Hoffa and Giancana and was described by
Jack Anderson as “the underworld’s major financial figure in the Midwest.”

Pecora was a Carlos Marcello associate whose friend Emile
Bruneau bailed Oswald out of jail when he was arrested with the Cubans.

So Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was correct in stating that both
Oswald and Ruby, - especially Ruby, did make telephone calls of investigative
significance to mobsters that Robert F. Kennedy, as Attorney General, would
have recognized as suspects under investigation.

In reporting on RFK Jr.’s remarks about the assassination,
ABC News quoted historian Robert Dallek as saying the assassination has been “investigated,
re-investigated, investigated again and again and no one’s ever come up with
highly credible evidence” to contradict the theory that Oswald acted alone.

Well there certainly is highly credible evidence that Oswald
did not act alone, whatever it is you believe he did, and the telephone records
of both Oswald and Ruby do indicate that both men were connected, at least by
telephone, to mobsters who were being investigated by RFK’s Justice Department,
just as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in Dallas.

This is not to say that organized crime and these mobsters
were responsible for murdering the president. As Kennedy is also quoted as
saying, “I think my father was fairly convinced at the end of that that there
had been involvement by somebody …”

What is significant is that despite the JFK Act of 1992, which ordered the release of all the government records, the CIA
has continued to withhold many assassination records for reasons of national
security, belying the contention that the murder of the president is ancient
history or no longer relevant.

It isn’t a matter of debating who killed the president, or
blaming anyone, credible evidence indicates Oswald alone was not responsible for the assassination, outstanding questions have yet to be answered, many records are still
secret, the case is not closed, and the law enforcement system should at least make
the attempt to answer those questions and bring legal resolution to an unsolved
homicide.

[William E. Kelly, Jr. is a freelance journalist from Browns
Mills, New Jersey, who writes
JFKcountercoup.blogspot.com. He can be reached at Bkjfk3@yahoo.com ]